How things look through an Oregonian's eyes

August 31, 2005

Do I think I can dance? No, unless “dance” is interpreted so loosely as to include an even more spastic rendition of Steve Martin’s Happy Feet. But I love to watch great dancing, so Fox’s “So you think you can dance” is a Wednesday night joy for Laurel and me.

If you haven’t been watching the show, give it a try tonight. We’ve been following the remaining sixteen dancers (eight guys and eight girls) from the beginning, so have our favorites and unfavorites. They’re all talented, for sure, but some are more deserving of winning the competition than others.

My bet is on Blake and Melody. Allan is an evident crowd favorite because of his rotund undancerlike body and his likable personality. And when he performs hip-hop, his specialty, he rocks.

We’re just waiting for him to draw “Quickstep” from the hat (each week the dancers pick out a slip that determines the style they have to perform on the next program), which will reveal whether Allan has more moves than hip-hop in his repertoire.

If you’re opposed to reality shows because they’re so mean-spirited, know that “So you think you can dance” is a warm and fuzzy competition.

Whereas Survivor makes you leave the island immediately after you’ve been voted off, this program engages in a seemingly endless series of “good luck, you’re really a great dancer” praise from the judges, hugs and kisses from the other competitors, and a farewell performance where the booted dancer gets to show off his or her stuff one more time.

We’re investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), which sold off the Pringle Creek Community land and still owns the remaining 240 acres of the site, as this map shows.

If you do a search for “Sustainable Fairview” on this weblog (use Google box in left column) you’ll come up with quite a few posts that I’ve written on the subject, most of them critical of how SFA has been going about its business.Those criticisms still stand. But Pringle Creek Community is a fresh opportunity to do sustainability right.

For example, it was great to see various community groups concerned with sustainable living represented at the open house, since SFA has been excessively closed. Laurel and I learned a lot about compost tea from Wilamette Organics and also enjoyed perusing other booths.

So in spite of my frustrations with SFA, it felt good to wander around the as-yet-unbuilt Pringle Creek Community land and realize that all the blood, sweat, tears, and money SFA has put into this challenging project are on the verge of being transformed into sustainable reality.

It’s sort of hard to get a feel for what the development is going to be like from layouts like this, though. I assume the actual housing units are going to be less blocky.

Nathan Good is one of the green architects involved with Pringle Creek Community. Laurel and I trudged across a hot dry mowed field to the booth where he was holding forth. Proving that birds of a sustainable feather flock together, I saw that Larry Gunn (tall guy in the farthest away white hat) and Russ Beaton (dark glasses, sitting on hay bale) had congregated there also.

Larry, Russ, and I were part of an Eco-Enterprises group founded by Russ that did its best to line up funding to buy out SFA and pursue a really sustainable vision for Sustainable Fairview. Visionaries that we were, we didn’t have enough grounding in hard-nosed real estate development savvy to pull it off.

I heard Nathan say that Pringle Creek Community likely won’t match the original sustainable goals that were set out for Sustainable Fairview. But then, the remaining 240 acres of the project almost certainly won’t either. They’re in the process of being sold by SFA to another developer who promises to be Green, just as Pringle Creek Community is.

It’s just that there are many levels and varieties of greenness. Russ, who was in on the ground floor of buying the Fairview property from the state, wanted to push the limits of Sustainable Fairview and make it a world class cutting-edge sustainable development. That probably isn’t going to happen.

But Pringle Creek Community is going to be a great place to live, for sure. As we were waiting to register for the open house I heard a man say that he was living in Portland now and would move to Salem if he’s able to build his dream green house at this development.

Getting back to Nathan, he said that "carbon neutral" is replacing the term "zero net energy." Many of the homes at Pringle Creek Community will be carbon neutral, thereby taking a small but important step toward combating global warming.

In hopes that the search engines will find this post, I hereby declare that Keith, a.k.a. Imaginary Keith, a.k.a. the Garden Poet, has revealed a new word to the world: Diogenist.

Of course, he might have stolen it from someone else. In which case I take back what I just said.

In any event, a Word Generation Prize will soon arrive in Keith’s mailbox. It may look a lot like payment for a Garden Poet tree-cutting and pruning bill that I’ve had for a while, but it should be considered a literary prize.

August 26, 2005

(1) I don’t know why our dog, Serena, likes to lie directly in the hot sun when it’s over 90 degrees. Every afternoon, about 2:00, I let her out when I go to get the mail. She walks up to an area of brown cut grass under a bird feeder and plops down.

When I get back from the mailbox and call her, she just stares at me. Sometimes I have to drag her by the collar to get her to come inside. She seems to love being hot, notwithstanding being covered with fur. Does anyone have an explanation?

(3) In one sense, I don’t know how it is possible for a man to be married to an absolute babe and still not be satisfied with her. Also, I do know, because it is the human condition to always want more than you have, no matter how good it is.

Consider the case of baseball star Jose Canseco, who used to be married to the knock-out Jessica Canseco. Jessica is featured in this month’s Playboy. As the saying goes, it’s hard to imagine that any (heterosexual) man would kick her out of bed. But Jose did, so to speak, having numerous affairs. He even spurned Jessica after she gave him a threesome with her and a female friend.

Moral: fantasies aren’t reality. Billy Bob Thornton reportedly said that sex with Angelina Jolie wasn’t so hot. Of course, nothing as insignificant as reality is going to come between me and my own Angelina fantasies.

(4) I now know that bouncing can be a fascinating job, thanks to the blog Clublife, billed as “An online narrative of the life of a bouncer at two of New York's most popular nightclubs.” Take a read and peek into a lifestyle far removed from our own life in the slow lane.

August 24, 2005

Last March I emailed Willamette Week and suggested that they do a story on Taylor, saying “It bothers me that while it is official Oregon policy that global warming is a threat to the northwest, Oregon’s official climatologist is going around spouting an exactly opposite view.”

This is one of the themes in the Willamette Week article, “Hot or Not: Oregon’s official weatherman has good news about global warming—it doesn’t exist.”

I’ve been blogging on about the absurdity of an environmentally conscious state being represented by someone who has his head in the sand concerning the reality of human-caused global warming.

Whenever I wrote about George Taylor, sometimes I’d think to myself, “Maybe I’m being too hard on this guy. If I ever meet him, I’d probably like him.”

Indeed, the WW story starts off with: “George Taylor shouldn't scare anybody. He has been a vegetarian since the 1970s. He commutes to work by bicycle. He's an ex-hippie and an ex-surfer. He recycles. He likes trees and salmon.”

But then the article’s author, Paul Koberstein, says: “He’s also, according to his critics, one of the most dangerous men in Oregon.”

Dangerous, because global warming is no joke. It’s real, it’s here, and it’s going to create a lot of problems for the world. Everyone has the right to his or her own personal opinions. However, science isn’t about personal opinions—it’s about facts.

Taylor is quoted as saying, “A lot of people wish I’d shut up. I have an opinion on this issue. I’d rather go ahead and express that opinion than shut up because I might offend somebody.”

Well, for Taylor as an individual, that’s fine. But when Taylor runs around making speeches and signing petitions as Oregon’s official state climatologist, he should have his facts straight. Which, he doesn’t, as the WW article makes clear.

Now that I’ve read the article, I feel like I’ve been too easy on Taylor, not too hard. When one of his colleagues at the OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences was asked about how Taylor has come to hold his uninformed views, Prof. James Coakley said:

"The best explanation I can come up with is, George is very tied into the conservative bent. He gets all his information from the conservative-type think tanks. George picks it up and regurgitates it. Some of the stuff is half-baked at best, but sometimes it's so bad we have to call him on it and write letters to the editor. It's just not right; it just counters all the evidence."

It’s time Oregon got a new state climatologist. Way past time. I hope the heat continues to be kept on George Taylor and those at Oregon State University who are keeping him in his position.

But in the area of global warming, Oregon also is a poster child for faith-based science. I can envision a mocking “OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences” T-shirt showing an ostrich with its head in the sand saying, “What global warming? I don’t see any global warming!”

For the Oregon Climate Service is based at Oregon State University. It is headed by the state climatologist, George Taylor, who—as I’ve written about before—is a Pollyanna on global warming.

Actually, “Pollyanna” is too gentle a word, for it connotes a person who is foolishly or blindly optimistic. I don’t think Taylor is blind to the fact of global warming. He willfully chooses to ignore the facts.

There’s a scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is for real. There’s no more controversy about the basic facts of global warming than there is over the basic facts of evolution.

The national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States of America have issued a statement: “Global Response to Climate Change” (this is a PDF file). It says, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring” and “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.”

But Oregon’s state climatologist apparently thinks he knows more than the National Academy of Sciences. George Taylor is a tireless spokesman for global-warming deniers, who have as many facts on their side as do evolution-deniers. Namely, virtually none.

Taylor and his ten comrades who signed the above-linked letter to Sen. John McCain are precisely the sorts of people the highly reputable RealClimate commentary site on climate science warns about. Noting in December 2004 that the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment has come under attack, these climate scientists said:

“Sadly, in recent years we have become accustomed to a ritual in which the publication of each new result on anthropogenic climate change is greeted by a flurry of activity from industry-funded lobby groups, think tanks and PR professionals, who try to discredit the science and confuse the public about global warming.”

Which is just what George Taylor is doing, using his pulpit as state climatologist to preach that human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming isn’t occurring. However, it is. RealClimate presents the scientific consensus:

(1) The earth is getting warmer
(2) People are causing this
(3) If greenhouse gas emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate

August 20, 2005

Last night we talked about a favorite subject, Why Salem Sucks, during the monthly meeting of our Salon discussion group. While we found some good things to say about Salem, at least two-thirds of the conversation involved the bad and the ugly.

The meeting was up in Portland, actually—at the home of Mark and Lynda, group members who recently moved to a beautiful condo on the Willamette River (see “Salem escapees head for Sellwood area”). So we had put some distance between us and Salem, which perhaps produced a clearer perspective on the town long-time residents adore and revile in roughly equal measure.

Bill threw out the theory that two factors keep Salem mired in mediocrity: (1) state employees get and keep their jobs because they’re uncreative, and (2) the state institutions (mental hospital, corrections facilities, etc.) situated here drag down the already low creativity quotient.

I found #1 persuasive until I remembered that I’d moved to Salem in 1977 to take a job with the State Health Planning and Development Agency. So I quickly dismissed this portion of Bill’s theory as hitting too close to home. However, #2 makes sense, so long as we consider the Oregon legislature to be one of the institutions inhabited by mentally and/or morally defective people.

In fact, society would be considerably better off if the patients presently in the Oregon State Hospital were released and replaced with all of the state legislators (or at least the House Republicans, with Karen Minnis and Wayne Scott being the most deserving of sedation and straitjackets.)

When we started talking specifics about what we liked and didn’t like about Salem, this is my recollection of what we came up with:

The Bad: Mayor Janet Taylor, her mostly conservative city council, boarded-up buildings, deserted downtown after dark, a back-to-the-50s vision of the future, apathetic ignorant voters, largely-ignored riverfront, under funded library system, a Keizer that should be part of Salem but isn’t.

Mayor Taylor should be demanding that Boise Cascade find a way to expeditiously demolish this eyesore, but I’m afraid that her short-sighted vision is more concerned with keeping the 90 paper plant jobs in Salem than with making the riverfront a vibrant place for people to live, work, and play, which, naturally, would have a much greater economic benefit than what is there now.

But probably nothing will change with the Boise Cascade plant. That’s Salem’s modus operandi: When in doubt, don’t.

“Salem,” says Wikipedia, is derived from the Hebrew word “Shalom,” which means peace. I also read that “the Native American name for the area was Chemeketa, which means ‘meeting or resting place.’”

August 18, 2005

Outwardly golfers can appear completely normal, but the very fact that they golf testifies to their underlying bizarreness. As evidence I submit this photo of Ron Morey (along with his wife, Rita) looking pleasantly normal enough during a bike ride at Black Butte Ranch last Tuesday.

Indeed, Ron is a wonderful guy. Laurel and I enjoyed the four days we just spent with Ron and Rita at our cabin in Camp Sherman. But this doesn’t negate the fact that Ron is an avid golfer, which means, ipso facto, that his mind works in mysterious ways, fully fathomable only to another member of his cult.

For example, during a phone conversation while he was still in Seattle he said that I should go golfing with him at one of the Black Butte Ranch courses. Ron knew that I hadn’t played golf for over ten years, leaving aside the whiffle balls that he and I hit at my home here in Salem a while back.

Yet somehow he thinks that it’s a fine idea for me to jump right onto a pretty tough golf course. I need to say that “tough,” to me, is defined much more in psychological than physical terms. That is, a tough course is any course where a considerable number of people would see me flailing away at the ball.

I knew that (1) Black Butte Ranch is a popular summer destination spot, (2) Many homes at the resort are situated next to the golf courses and, even worse, have large picture windows, and (3) Bike trails run adjacent to, or even through, the courses, thereby adding to the potential population that would be viewing my humiliation.

Nonetheless, Ron told me, “You just need to go out and hit some balls at the driving range. Then you’ll be fine when we play.” After more than ten years of not playing golf? It’s insane to think that I’d be “fine” after hitting a few buckets of balls.

This psychiatric conclusion was confirmed after I did indeed hit a bucket of balls at the South Salem driving range. I couldn’t believe that Ron had convinced me to go there, but I myself am open to golfing fantasies, having played this crazy game quite a bit in my high school days and episodically thereafter.

So with a decided sense of unreality I found myself at the driving range last week, teeing up a ball with 5-iron in hand. I took a few ungainly practice swings. I had no expectation that I could hit the ball with any semblance of golfing prowess. I stepped up to the tee, made my first swing, and “whack!”…the ball sails straight and far a mile down the range.

Hmmmm. “Beginner’s luck,” I said to myself. I teed up another ball. Whack! Again, straight and far another mile.

“Man, I’m a natural! I haven’t hit a golf ball for a decade and look at me! This game is easy! What’s the big deal with golf?! Bring it on!” With those delusional thoughts, my descent into driving range hell began.

My initial what-the-heck looseness changed into an I-can-do-even-better tightness. The more I tried to replicate those first few natural swings, the more my balls either dribbled down the grass or soared like slicing/hooking unmajestic eagles.

Needless to say, I ended up telling Ron to put himself down as a Big Meadow course single, not a twosome. I’m up with Buddhism and am fine with the ego-loss thing, but I’d rather have it happen gradually rather than all at once during a brief 18 holes.

Well, it wouldn’t have been all that brief, actually. That’s another crazy thing about golf. Ron had a 9:00 am tee time. He finished about 3:00. It took him six hours to hit a stupid ball just 88 times. That’s standing still and swinging your arms every four minutes, not exactly pushing your body to the limit.

But it was more than I was willing to do, so I was happy to hear Ron recount his golfing exploits. Most notably, a birdie on a 432 yard par 4 that resulted from a 195 yard 3-wood shot that landed two feet from the hole. (I heard about the shot so many times, I’ve committed the details to memory).

Ron felt bad that I hadn’t enjoyed a golfing experience, so he talked me into having one of my own. For some reason I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as he did. Guess I just felt teed off.

Our canine companion, Serena, had a good time making friends with his own “Big Dog” pal though.

And this morning I enjoyed getting back at Ron by razzing him for bundling up with a blanket and vest on August 18, for god’s sake, when it was already a balmy 64 degrees in Camp Sherman and heading for the 80’s. Ron obliged with his best dottering old man in the nursing home imitation.

Ron, amazingly generous guy that he is, gave me a golf ball emblazoned with the particulars of his consulting business, Profound Results. Now that I’ve advertised him on my blog, he probably will try to write off his entire trip to Oregon.

Hopefully the IRS doesn’t read weblogs. But after a previous visit to Black Butte Ranch, I learned that police do read weblogs.

August 17, 2005

If you believe that your religion is superior to every other, it’s easy to believe that your race is superior to every other. Blind faith immune to facts is the foundation of every erroneous belief. So faith is the root of both fundamentalism and racism.

Such is the unoriginal thesis of my Church of the Churchless “Fundamentalism is religious racism” post. I cite research supporting the contention that closed-minded prejudice is a single force that manifests in many forms.

So faith isn’t a good thing. It’s a bad thing. Faith is the pod that allows the peas of fundamentalism and racism to grow.

If you’re faithless, be proud. Faithlessness is the only road out of the dead end of insane “isms” that are tearing this country in particular and the world in general apart.

Science and reason are faithless, having faith only in the tenet that, as the X-Files put it, “The Truth is Out There.” But you have to get outside of the walls of your false prejudices and dogmas to find it.

August 15, 2005

There used to be a message painted on the side of a barn that was visible from the freeway south of Salem: “Soldiers of the Lord, Armor Up!” I had a creepy feeling every time I saw it.

That feeling is still with me, even stronger now. For the Christian armoring-up is no longer an admonition but a reality. Fundamentalists are fighting battles on many fronts. And they mean business. This is no joke. It’s war.

Read T.A. Barnhart’s excellent essay that was posted today on BlueOregon, “The Religious Right’s Coming Civil War?” Barnhart includes a question mark in his title, but this reformed fundamentalist is confident that the war is coming:

There is a battle coming, and it won't be restricted to politics and elections. Those who believe they are God's chosen will act upon that belief…I just know the mind set, the vast and unshakable belief in the holy righteousness of their thoughts and opinions. They have created God in their own image, and they will seek to force us all to kneel before their self-created idol. What happens when we necessarily refuse?

I don’t know. Nobody does. I’m sure that it won’t be a well-mannered fight, however. The progressives, independents, humanists, and other tolerant people believe in being reasonable.

Reason means squat to a fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Jew, or adherent of any other faith-based religion. Fundamentalists don’t believe in reason; they believe in the revelation of their holy book or religion’s founder. Unbelievers are toast, fit only to be buttered up and crunched into oblivion.

I’m reading Charles Freeman’s excellent (though scholarly) book about the rise of Christianity, appropriately titled “The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason.” This morning I got to the cheery part about the Christian emperor Justinian massacring 30,000 to 50,000 of his own citizens in 532.

A contemporary historian, Procopius, said: “Justinian did not see it as murder if the victims did not share his own beliefs.” Christians were excusing the killing of infidels way before al-Qaeda.

Now, I’m not suggesting that non-religious folks like me and my wife need to worry about the Christian right causing us physical harm. (Laurel does, however, fret about the imposition of a fundamentalist dress code for women, since she’s guessing that it wouldn’t be based on the teals and purples that she favors, nor would fused glass earrings likely be on the approved jewelry list, which would render meaningless countless hours of Laurel’s shopping.).

But the Christian jihadists are unabashedly out to dominate American culture. That’s why they consider themselves to be fighting a “culture war” to defend traditional values.

Hmmmm, that’s funny. I’ve always thought that my non-Christian beliefs were a lot more traditional. After all, I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life and find the theory of karma/reincarnation to be a pretty compelling basis for morality. This has been a traditional Hindu belief for way longer than Christianity has been around.

No matter. Fundies like Cal Thomas, whom I saw interviewed on a Nightline program last week along with the more moderate conservative George Will, come right out and say that debates over single issues like the teaching of intelligent design can’t be isolated from the Grand Christian Fundamentalist Culture War.

Thomas said that Christian red-staters are fed up with having their values shut out of public schools and rejected by godless judges. He ran off a bunch of interrelated battles that all coalesce in the broader culture war: gay rights, Terri Schiavo, display of the Ten Commandments, prayer in schools, teaching of intelligent design/creationism.

Christians like Thomas don’t want to peacefully coexist in a diverse culture where many faiths and non-faiths are practiced. They want to make Christianity the state religion, just as in the good old days (to Christians, not for pagans) of Constantine. Witness yesterday’s religious rally that attacked “arrogant” judges, broadcast to churches all across the country.

Gosh, for some reason I thought Christians went to church on Sunday to be spiritual, not political. Obviously I misunderstand Christianity; I guess it doesn’t have much to do with Christ.

If you want more proof that T.A. Barnhart is correct—the Christian right is out to start a culture war that could tear this country apart—I offer as evidence a portion of an email message that I received recently from Ford Vox. Ford is the founder of Universism, a faithless approach to spirituality that matches up well with my own churchless leanings.

He had lunch with a director of Focus on the Family, a Christian right organization. After what he hoped would be a “diplomatic meeting” between two people on different sides of the culture war, Ford had this to say to his fellow Universists: (which I’ll include as a continuation to this post)

I’m handling it in the same way I handle the leprechauns in our garden, since managing something non-existent doesn’t require a lot of work.

But before I realized that those who say “fame is fleeting” are vastly overstating the duration of my local blogging notoriety, I wasted quite a bit of time yesterday fretting about how to deal with the repercussions of the newspaper article.

I wanted to buy three more copies of the Friday paper. I planned out the best way to do this without looking like an egomaniac. If I went to a convenience store and plopped the papers down on the counter, a front page facing the clerk, he could glance at the photo in the upper left corner, match it up with the guy buying all the papers, and think to himself, “What an egotistical asshole.”

I thought of wearing a ski mask, but that didn’t seem like a good idea given that it’s August and I’d be walking up to a 7-Eleven cash register. So my preferred plan was to find six quarters and an isolated Statesman-Journal paper box.

However, when I went into town in the afternoon I needed to get gas and figured that I might as well venture into the station’s mini-mart and scope out the newspaper supply. “Praise Allah!” I said to myself, even though I’m not a Muslim, when I saw that (1) there were exactly three papers left in the display rack, and (2) there wasn’t a clerk visible anywhere in the store.

So I plunked $1.50 down on the counter, held the copies so my photo wasn’t showing, and walked back to my car with a “I left a buck fifty inside for the papers” to the attendants. Mission accomplished.

My next worry was how I was going to run a bunch of errands without getting engaged in lengthy conversations about the story with people who knew me. I rehearsed witty repartees to the expected “So, how are you dealing with your fifteen minutes of fame?” I practiced humble expressions in the rear-view mirror.

More wasted time. First, I had to drop off our neighborhood group’s checkbook at the treasurer’s house. He and his wife were pruning their extensive garden. I chit-chatted longer than the occasion demanded, waiting for them to bring up the subject of the blogging article, how I look younger in person than in the photo, and so on.

I waited. And waited. Either they hadn’t read the paper, or the blogging story didn’t catch their eye sufficiently to match up the featured blogger with the human presence standing right in front of them.

It turned out that this either-or hypothesis was going to be repeated in my mind quite a few times. Like, at the Animal Clinic; at Oak Tree Pharmacy; at Office Depot; and at the Courthouse Athletic Club.

Some of these were long shots for recognition, but I had high hopes for the athletic club where I’ve been a long time member, copies of the Statesman-Journal are scattered all over, and you spend quite a bit in a room with fellow exercisers, thereby allowing sufficient time for them to make a connection between the fascinating article that they had read only that morning and the graying man on the Stairmaster or Nautilus machine.

Realizing that many people are reluctant to intrude upon a celebrity’s privacy, in both of the exercise rooms I used at the athletic club I listened carefully for any hint of a whispered “Is that really him? The guy whose photo was on the front page of the paper today? I think it could be. He’s better looking in person, though.”

I listened. And listened. The either-or hypothesis made its appearance again. Sigh…

So far only my friends Patricia and Keith have commented on my blogging story glory. Patricia via a phone call, and Keith via his weblog, where he cries in his beer (or, rather, tofu) about not being featured in the story himself. Hey, like I said in my previous post, I tried to get the reporter to contact Salem bloggers Keith and Trey along with William (who did make it into the story).

Oh, yes, I should add my sister to the “Wow! That’s cool” feedback list. She just posted a comment saying, “I knew one of us would be famous! I'm glad it's you.”

August 12, 2005

Namely, me. I pulled our paper out of the box today and saw a graying, grizzled, plaintive face peering from the top left corner of the front page next to a “Local blogger likes instant feedback” caption.

It didn’t take me long to realize, “Aaaagh, that’s me! I look horrible.” Well, at least I got some instant feedback from myself. Fortunately, the larger photo in the Life Section article “Got blogs?” cast my quizzical look in a broader context and, thankfully, reduced the focus on my face.

Unfortunately, Serena (our dog) was crouched just out of sight. She had popped up just before the photographer snapped the picture, but ducked down too quickly to be included in the photo. I shall remedy this slight with a link to her oft-linked Wonder Dog portrait that was posed on the banks of the Metolius River.

Speaking of slights, when I wrote to the Statesman-Journal suggesting that they do a story on local bloggers, I said that the paper should buy us coffee at a local café and have a roundtable discussion about our blogging lives. I certainly didn’t expect that one blogger, moi, would be the central focus of an article about blogs. But reporters and editors do what they do, a fact I learned long ago when I was a publicist for a statewide health organization.

Salem blogger Keith of WordShadows and Scrine is much more literary and creative than I am. Plus he uses Expression Engine to design his weblog, which requires hugely more expertise than tinkering with a preset TypePad layout, like I do. And Salem blogger Trey of The Rambling Taoist is much more progressive and politically active than I am. He also contributes to Blue Oregon, a blog that I visit daily.

On the corrections front, I’m pretty sure that I told the reporter it was Trey who said that he, a self-professed liberal, “can post comments on a conservative blog, but he [Trey, not me] said his comments are deleted immediately.”

And a statement by the reporter that my books, “including a 2004 meditation on the Greek philosopher Plotinus, seemed to disappear as soon as they hit the shelves,” could be misinterpreted as meaning that the books were best-sellers (I only wish). Actually, I think she means that after a book is bought by a reader, the author rarely gets any feedback about what he or she wrote—which is absolutely true.

I’m pleased that my post, “American Splendor/I learn to wash lettuce,” was mentioned in the article. Google has this highly ranked in the “wash lettuce” results, but like the article says, my theme wasn’t so much about how to wash lettuce as how men and women relate in the kitchen (and elsewhere). I can report that my lettuce washing tutoring continues episodically, Laurel being ever vigilant to preserve the Right Way of Doing Things, which is a sacred wifely duty that I heartily endorse.

August 10, 2005

Suppose this happened to you, an American citizen. Your plane lands at the Montreal airport and Canadian officials hold you without charges. They don’t let you talk to a lawyer, then ship you off to another country to be tortured. After ten months you’re released without any charges being filed.

Oops. Guess we made a mistake, says Canada. Sorry for all the torture. Hope there’s no hard feelings.

Well, there should be. And in Maher Arar’s case, there are. For this is just what happened to him. Except, he holds joint Canadian/Syrian citizenship and it was American officials who seized him in New York. A New York Times story about Arar’s lawsuit against the U.S. government starts this way:

Foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food, lawyers for the government said in Brooklyn federal court yesterday. (Here's another story on this subject).

Isn’t that extraordinary? And it’s even worse than that. For the U.S. government also sent him off to Syria, even though they told his lawyer that he was in a New Jersey jail. The government is saying that courts should keep their nose out of national security issues. Disturbingly, it sounds like the judge in this case is receptive to that argument.

That’s even more extraordinary. It shows how far we’ve sunk since 9/11. Travesties like extraordinary rendition (which I’ve written about before) barely generate a yawn from a public that sheepishly accepts the Bush administration’s claim that everything is justified in a time of war.

Oh, excuse me. I forgot that we’re no longer engaged in a “war on terror.” It is a “struggle against global extremism.” Well, there’s plenty of extremism to struggle against right here at home.

So let’s stop the extreme practice of kidnapping foreigners and shipping them off to be tortured in another country without filing any charges against them, or giving them any access to the court system.

And let’s stop the even more extreme practice of unconstitutionally arresting American citizens such as Jose Padilla, who has been held for over three years without being charged with a crime or given access to a lawyer.

Al Qaeda extremists are abhorrent. But so are United States government extremists. I don’t like extremism in any form, except for taking an extreme stand against extremism.

August 08, 2005

We watched the first episode of “Weeds” last night on Showtime. It’s about a suburban mother who sells marijuana in the neighborhood to support herself after her husband died.

Weeds is hard to categorize: comedy, drama, dark comedy, light drama? That’s a big part of why I’m confident the show will continue to be so enjoyable. Like other pay cable series such as “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under,” “Weeds” takes its own unique creative path apart from the usual boring broadcast crap.

I knew I was going to like Weeds as soon as the first bars of a long-forgotten song, “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, came over our tinny television speakers (we’re not surrounded by surround sound).

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Ah, a memory of the 60s. All hail to nonconformism! Though I have to admit that we hippies mostly acted and dressed alike. If you were part of my San Jose State College counterculture circle and didn’t smoke marijuana, why…you weren’t going to be part of the circle for very long.

The suburban mother, played by the marvelous Mary-Louise Parker, buys her stash from a black family that doesn’t live in the suburbs. A scene where Parker is nervously watching her marijuana being bagged (“I think you’re shorting me on that one!”) made me recall similar moments in my college days (the statute of limitations was passed long ago, hopefully).

My boys and I were truly honest and generous when we passed on the gift of weed to other tokers. But other people weren’t. We got burned quite a few times and ended up smoking twigs and god knows what else when an outwardly fine-looking baggie ended up being more appearance than substance.

Laurel and I decided to fork over $11.99 a month and add Showtime to our DISH network subscription because of the made-for-Showtime specials like Weeds that we had been reading about. So far it looks like our money is going to be well-spent, especially when you add in the value of the deliciously soft-core fare that runs on Showtime late at night.

Like “Passion’s Peak,” which I recorded a few days ago. This movie has some sort of plot, I gather, but that’s irrelevant. For the ideal way to watch direct-to-cable movies like Passion’s Peak would be to find a digital video recorder that has a reverse V-chip or TV Guardian feature. By “reverse,” I mean that the feature would filter out all of the extraneous plot line and dialogue and just leave in the sex and nudity. That would save me time.

Along these lines, Weeds takes a realistic view of teenage sexuality and drug use that won’t win the series any awards from the Parent’s Television Council. Parker’s younger son falls through a skylight. Then, a bit later in the show, the mother of her older son’s girlfriend makes Parker promise that she won’t allow their kids to have sex under her roof.

I should have seen this coming, but it was a funny surprise to see the two teenagers in bed—under the unrepaired skylight, naturally. “We aren’t having sex under your roof, Mom,” her son says when Parker discovers them.

August 06, 2005

Karen Minnis is speaker of the House, where her Republicans comprise 55% of the House members (33/60). Her blatantly lopsided appointments to the Emergency Board, which is a mini-legislature in between Oregon’s biennial sessions, were 78% Republican (7/9).

Peter Courtney is president of the Senate, where his Democrats comprise 60% of the Senate members (18/30). His eminently fair appointments to the Emergency Board were 63% Democrat (5/8).

So once again the Democrats play nice while the Republicans play dirty. Of the 17 E-Board members, 10 will be Republican—59%. Yet the 90-member Oregon legislature is split exactly 50-50. But not the Emergency Board, which will be excessively dominated by Republicans.

When will the Dems learn that when you have the power to do good, you need to use it? Courtney should have told Minnis, “If you’re going to stack the House E-Board deck with Republicans, I’m going to do the same with Democrats on the Senate side.”

As this article in today’s Oregonian says, “Even with less power, conservatives find way to steer bus.” That’s because the Democrats stay in the middle of the road, while the Republicans keep way to the right. Compromise then means following a course midway in the right lane, not the center.

Somehow Oregon Democrats managed to look powerless this legislative session even though they controlled two out of three centers of power: the Senate and Governorship. That’s shameful. It’s one thing to lose political power; it’s another thing to give it away.

August 04, 2005

Caution: if your heart palpitates at the sight of cute dogs, do not look at any more of this post without a cardiologist’s permission.

But if you’re feeling adventurous, here’s some photos that I took yesterday at downtown Salem’s “Dog Days of Summer” First Wednesday celebration. Our dog, Serena, took part in the dog parade along with lots of other canines.

The parade formed on State Street next to Jonathan’s Oyster Bar. These cute puppies got lots of attention from some equally cute girls.

This golden retriever, Jake Beebe, got the award for best costume, masquerading as a black cat.

Not to take anything away from Jake, but Laurel and I think this bulldog bee should have won.

There were lots of little dogs in baby carriages. If I owned these guys I don’t know how I’d ever stop smiling when they had their curly tongues out.

I absolutely had to take a photo of this dog. He was wonderfully stationary. One thing I learned about dog photography yesterday: your subjects hardly ever stay still.

Oops. How’d this photo sneak in here? Obviously my eyes weren’t only on the dogs.

Dog yin and yang.

The dog parade ended at the Equitable Center, where a Waggiest Tail Contest was held. This was our best shot for Serena, since her costume consisted of a couple of bandanas and we didn’t hold out much hope for a Best Dog Trick award. Laurel did her best to get the tail wagging, but Serena was beaten out by a couple of shorter-tailed dogs with faster-moving appendages.

Oh, well, We still had a good time. Serena wished that we had stopped at this table, though, and taken home something she could have a really good time with.

So far I’m the only member. But I just started the group this afternoon and I’m pretty sure I can talk my wife into joining, which will instantly double our size. Plus, Christianity started off slow too. In my grandiosity I’ve started to think of myself as a secular anti-Paul, helping to spread the good news about anti-religion.

The Salem Universists aren’t meeting yet, unless you count Laurel and me sitting down together every evening to worship at the feet of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. If you live in the Salem area, consider becoming a member so we can eventually have real meetings--sign up here.